Calcutta, April 12: Congress leader Arunava Ghosh today demanded the resignation of education minister Partha Chatterjee, accusing him of plagiarising in his doctoral thesis.

The Telegraph reported today that several chapters of the 2014 thesis, submitted to North Bengal University, contain long verbatim extracts from papers by various authors without appropriate citations as required under academic protocols.

Ghosh also demanded that Chatterjee drop the doctorate tag immediately as it had been "established beyond doubt" that several chapters had been lifted "line by line" from earlier published papers in violation of research citation guidelines laid down by the University Grants Commission.

"In Chatterjee's thesis paper, there is no clarity on which portions are original and which have been copy-pasted from other sources as he has failed to follow the citation guidelines. His research is nothing but a rip-off and it is a case of research misconduct. He cannot continue as education minister and must resign," Ghosh said at a news conference.

He said he would write to the UGC, demanding that Chatterjee's degree be revoked.

"We will first write to NBU, requesting it to take up the matter with the UGC. If they don't, I will make a move. I am also planning to file a case against Chatterjee and his supervisor, seeking revocation of the degree," Ghosh said.

Several calls to Chatterjee's cellphone for a response on Ghosh's demands went unanswered. Text messages did not elicit a response either.

At the news conference, Ghosh was accompanied by his daughter Aatreyee, a research scholar at JNU who has accessed a soft copy of Chatterjee's thesis, titled Transforming Indian economy into knowledge economy: the role of human resources with reference to India, from the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre.

INFLIBNET is an autonomous inter-university centre of the UGC that provides information through a nation-wide high-speed data network using state-of-the-art technology.

The Minimum Standard Procedure for Award of MPhil/PhD Degree Regulations, 2009, states that "following the successful completion of the evaluation process and announcement of the award, the awarding university (in this case NBU) shall submit a soft copy of the thesis to the UGC within a period of thirty days for hosting the same on INFLIBNET, accessible to all institutions/ universities".

Aatreyee said she searched for Chatterjee's thesis after being told by acquaintances in the academic community that it was not an original work and was in violation of the UGC's citation rules.

"The citation rules clearly state that at the bottom of each page of a chapter, a research scholar has to cite if he or she has borrowed any content from other sources. Even if you take a word, you have to properly acknowledge that. You have to mention the name of the author and the page number of the book from where the word or the content has been taken. You must be as meticulous as to mention whether you read the borrowed content on the web edition or the print edition. Nothing was followed in this case," she said.

Aatreyee said the lack of clarity on the citations in Chatterjee's thesis made it difficult to gauge how much he had borrowed and how much of it was original. In the thesis, Chatterjee has cited some sources at the end of every chapter, not page.

The citation methodology requires a research aspirant to do course work in a university, the span of which can vary from six months to a year, a research guide at Jadavpur University said.

"The course work helps one to be thorough with the citation rules. In fact, you are required to qualify in course work. In this case, Chatterjee was required to pass the course work at NBU," he added.

Anil Bhuimali, an economics professor under whose supervision Chatterjee had done the thesis, said the minister had completed the course work.

Aatreyee said she had analysed the thesis through the UGC-recognised plagiarism-detection software iThenticate and Turnitin and found that in all 10 chapters, on an average 59 to 66 per cent of the content had been lifted verbatim from various sources.

"I wonder why his supervisor did not alert him about the aberration. Ideally if the volume of borrowing exceeds 5 per cent in a chapter, the supervisor is supposed to warn the researcher," she said.